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Alfa AWUS036H (rtl 8187) + VMPlayer = endless trouble?

Hey there,

to cut long things short:
I'm having bad trouble to get my Alfa AWUS036H (USB-wlan-interface with rtl 8187) to work with the aircrack-ng when Backtrack 4 R2 is hosted as a virtual machine in VM-Player. That's sad since I bought the Alfa-interface about two years or something ago especially to use it with Backtrack 3 (and it did a wonderful job).

But now, on Backtrack 4 R2, I'm feeling like I'm having to hack my own wireless device instead of keeping on learning to compromise the designated pentesting-devices.

After some hours of research I figured that on the start of every VM-Player session I have to use

Code:

rmmod rtl8187
#unplug the Alfa in the VM-Player
modprobe rtl8187
#plug the Alfa in via VM-Player and wait like 5 secs
ifconfig wlan0 up

to get Wicd to find some connections and use Firefox, Metasploit, and so on.

But when I try to run

airmon-ng start wlan0 (for example), I get

Found 2 processes that could cause trouble...

After some long and annoying sessions of trial and error I made it with

rmmod rtl8187
#unplug via VM-Player*
modprobe rtl8187
#plug in via VM-Player and wait about 5 secs
ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig wlan0 down #yep, I had to put it up and then down
iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor
ifconfig wlan0 up

followed by airmon-ng start wlan0 and so on and it worked including working injection and recieving my handshake. But it only worked once and seems like I have just been lucky. Since then I allways get

The fact, that it workes sometimes and sometimes doesn't is really kind of driving me crazy, esp. since I copied any command in the shell that made it work - it never worked twice (regardless of reconnection, reboot, and stuff).

Does anybody know a solution for this problem (since I've seen that many Alfa-users got those difficulties)? Or do I finally have to buy another usb-wlan-device?

Thanks in advance and best wishes,

Carnivore

PS: While I'm writing this I didn't get a working wlan-connection even after trying this

Code:

rmmod rtl8187
#unplug the Alfa in the VM-Player
modprobe rtl8187
#plug the Alfa in via VM-Player and wait like 5 secs
ifconfig wlan0 up

Re: Alfa AWUS036H (rtl 8187) + VMPlayer = endless trouble?

I'm having almost the same issue using vmware workstation plus 036h (rtl8187).
And I've been doing basically the same maneuvers as you are to make it work. It works out of 10 tries and many times it takes 5 minutes to put wlan0 up.

When using bt4r1, issues were a little less. With bt4r2, it almost never works and when it does, channel hopping simply doesn't work... takes 10 seconds to jump channels.

If I ever find a way around these issues, I will post it here. Please do so if you find smtg.